


Covenant

by Clarice Chiara Sorcha (claricechiarasorcha)



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Diverges during TFA, F/M, M/M, Not TLJ-compliant, not-TRoS compliant
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-24 16:55:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 20,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21881377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/claricechiarasorcha/pseuds/Clarice%20Chiara%20Sorcha
Summary: Displeased with Kylo Ren's obsessing over the scavenger girl from Jakku, Armitage Hux decides it's high time he took the advantage.Things are not going to go the way he thinks.
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Finn/Rey (Star Wars)
Comments: 35
Kudos: 165





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I started this fic at the beginning of this year, plotted the entire damn thing out, then got angry and disheartened and quit.
> 
> Then I saw TRoS the other day and said fuck it, I want to see my different reality for Finn, Rey, Kylo, and Hux, and here I am. Finishing the damn thing. Yes, it's finnrey and kylux, and explores Rey's parentage in an entirely different way to TRoS. There's no particular spoilers for IX, by the way, as I planned this whole thing out in January. I just want something different. I want something _better_ for all four of them.
> 
> If you're curious/it matters, the POV changes from chapter to chapter; it's not all just from Rey's perspective. I hope to try and update once a week until it's done, but we'll see how it goes.
> 
> 💕
> 
> Still -- this is it, guys. The fanon belongs to us. We can do whatever we want, now.

She stopped only to contemplate which corner to take next. Behind her, the stranger’s sigh served as the first indication that this particular escape attempt had failed. Still she paused, did not look immediately backward. The way before her still remained open yet.

But then the voice spoke and she knew that this would not go the way she had intended.

“I was always led to believe that Ren was one of a very elite few who could do what you just did.”

Rey turned to find said voice solidified into a man; he stepped forth in military quickstep, tall body wreathed in a fine black greatcoat. One eyebrow raised in ironic question, calm demeanour infuriating and intimidating both as he continued. “But here we have it, seen by my own eyes: the scavenger girl from Jakku, using a Jedi mindtrick to escape from my own Stormtroopers.”

A serpentine strangle of fear coiled tight in her belly, throat burning dry as desert fire. Yet her voice held steady.

“You did not see me.”

The bright hair glinted with crimson heat as he cocked his head. “Oh, but I _do_ see you.” Before she could even speak again, he raised one gloved hand; the motion came serene, almost bored. “Don’t bother trying again. It doesn’t work on me.”

Two warring instincts tumbled over one another in her mind: the one that told her to try again anyway, and the other that implored her to just run. She didn’t quite understand why she listened to neither. “But it should,” she said, not quite able to keep a flash of panic from the words. He only shrugged in return.

“And you’re the expert on that, are you?” He did not quite laugh. “ _How_ long have you been able to do that? Because given that little performance in the interrogation chamber, I’m thinking this is a new thing for you.”

It was just another sense of violation – that not only had her abuse taken place at all, but that it had been observed by someone she hadn’t even known to be watching. With hands clenching at her sides, she set her jaw, held her chin high.

“Who are you?”

“You don’t know?”

While he did not seem particularly offended by her ignorance, Rey knew better than to trust such impression. Solitary as the majority of her existence had been, Unkar Platt’s lessons had never been the type one would need to learn twice.

Still, it didn’t feel quite true when she told him, “I have no idea who you are.”

“That’s fine.” The steady pronouncement didn’t seem to have offended him in the slightest, though both hands shifted forward to adjust gloves at the wrist. In turn Rey’s eyes dropped sharply to his waist – but the bulk of the coat would mask a sidearm, if in fact he wore one at all. Only the faint amusement of his voice drew her attention up again.

“Do you have a last name, Rey?”

Her name in his mouth felt a bitter thing. She did not see any benefit to masking her grimace. “If you were watching all that, I think you already know that I have no idea.”

“I was only checking.” Though he spoke in mild fashion, she couldn’t help but think of Kylo Ren. He had been the same: even when he had used a tone almost companionable, there had always been the sense of something less palatable below that. Of something creeping gleeful beneath the ordinary skin of a man masquerading as something far darker.

She knew must try again. “You did not see me,” she repeated, only the faintest hint of desperation colouring the urgent words. “You will walk away, and go about your business.”

“Ah, but _you_ are my business,” he replied, and took one step forward. She did not take one back. Not yet. Not even when he said, “I can’t just let Ren’s newest obsession go running about Starkiller, now can I.”

She meant to sound angry. Given the circumstances, she could forgive herself for the fear it held, too. “What do you _want_ from me?”

“Your time.” Something not quite a smile rose to his lips. There was not an inch of kindness to it at all. “So, if you would come with me?”

“What, back to Kylo Ren?”

A look of distaste crossed his face – and if she went by the speed at which he smoothed it away again, it had likely been involuntary. “Certainly not.”

Much as she did not desire such classification, she had to say it anyway. “But I’m _his_ prisoner.”

“Are you?” The glance he cast around the empty corridor came exaggerated, overwrought; she had the strange thought that this was a man who spent a reasonable amount of time around young children. But then he caught her gaze again, and his green-grey eyes were cold. “It looks to me as if you escaped.”

The incredulity came easy. “Yeah, but what about you?”

“What about me, indeed.” That smile hurt. Or at least, it reminded her strongly of times of hurt, of desperation and of misery.

“I need something from you,” he said, and now nails dug deep into her aching palms.

“I don’t have anything you want.” Defiance came so easy, for all it could be worth next to nothing. “I’m just a scavenger girl from Jakku.”

“Ah, but I don’t think you are.” Again he stepped closer, height made all the more intimidating by the dark sharp creases of a military uniform. “I think you’re so much more than that.”

With her mouth pressed into tight line she met his gaze, did not back down. She could not deny that these were words she had longed to hear. But she had not wished for them from lips such as these. On the heels of such a thought, the memory of Finn hit sudden and hard, mirrored by a longing both deep and desperate. Maybe they wouldn’t have been able to escape this. But at least they would have been together. If not for what Kylo Ren had done.

But she was not entirely out of options yet. “So if I give you this thing that you want,” she said, hardening her voice to that of a person who had bargained for her life more than once, “are you going to let me go?”

His lips curled in a pretence of pity. “Do you think it will be as easy as all that?”

Negotiation had long been a terror for her; at its heart lay the fear of making a mistake that might cost her food, water, her very life. But she’d learned to live with that a long time ago. She had no other option, not when she had been left to scrape for an existence in the graveyard that was Jakku.

“What do you want from me?”

Such harsh demand this time earned her his raised eyebrow. “So it’s to be that simple, then?”

“I’ll make you pay for it.”

Something not quite a smile played on his generous lips now. “So sure of yourself.” But any amusement his voice might have held disappeared now as he turned to survey their location. “We can’t have this conversation here.”

The prickle of unease tripping down her spine burned like sandstorm. “He’ll know that I’m gone.”

“Ren?” He actually snorted, his distaste not unlike Plutt’s when she brought him some particularly pitiful haul. “Don’t worry about Ren,” he said, already turning in new direction. “Come.”

He had the voice of a person used to being obeyed. Rey held her ground all the same. “Where are we going?”

An immediate expression of impatience again transformed his face as he turned back. “We’re in a corridor that is trafficked by various crew members of the base, and also by Stormtroopers,” he said, voice almost saccharine in its generosity. “Do you really think it’s safe to stand here and shoot the breeze like a couple of dirtball traders?”

“That didn’t answer my question.”

He gave a sharp exhale, one not quite laughter. “There’s a conference room just up the corridor.” Her expression gave her away, even as he rolled his eyes to see it. “And no, that’s not a euphemism.”

So little choice was left to her now. Still she hesitated. She hadn’t lied when she’d said she did not know this man. Yet there seemed something vaguely… _familiar_ to him, a feeling that made not a whit of sense. She had never seen a member of the First Order at all, let alone this slender man in his officer’s coat. She did not even know what rank he held, though the bands on the left arm surely said as much to the initiated. There seemed little to say such a man even left his ship often; there would be no need for him at all to come down to Jakku. But she knew better than to believe that meant he did not know how to fight.

When he spoke next it felt as though he read her mind; she hardly appreciated it after her experience of Kylo Ren’s hospitality. “I don’t suggest you try my patience, or my martial prowess,” he said, perfectly mild. “From what I gather, you do know your way around a decent amount of fisticuffs.” Now the tone hardened. “But I’ve spent my life being trained in them.”

“Just because I didn’t go to military school, doesn’t mean I didn’t learn the same lessons,” she shot back, not entirely with forethought. The considering gaze he swept up and down her body in return seemed to at least have somewhat more respect than previous.

“True, enough,” he said at last. “But the longer we stand here, the harder it is for me to suppress the surveillance footage – at least, in a fashion that Ren will accept.” Incredibly, he actually crooked an elbow to her. “So, shall we?”

Ignoring the gesture, Rey instead paused on the precipice of this final decision. Sense told her to demand how he would have the authority or even the ability to challenge Kylo Ren in anything he wanted. Sense also warned her – grudgingly so – that he was entirely correct in wanting to leave. Rey bit her tongue as he turned again, walked as if he expected her to follow. Still she paused as he walked away. He was not looking, not now. She could just run.

“You _could_ run,” he called back, infuriating in his divination of her racing thoughts. “But I can’t protect you if you do.”

Even as she stepped forward, she scowled. “What if I don’t need your protection?”

“Then go.” This time he didn’t look anywhere but forward. “And don’t dwell on what I might have offered you for it.”

In the moment that followed, silent save for his footsteps and the low living hum of the base around them, Rey closed her eyes. A path lay before her now, inescapably divergent. She didn’t even know how she planned to get off this damned planet.

Rey followed. The man didn’t look back, but the shift in his mood was sensed easily enough. She’s always been good at that – at guessing how a person felt, before they even knew it themselves. But perhaps it had simply been the Force all along. Knowing her power now only sharpened it. Almost too easily she poked a little deeper, a little harder.

Though his spine seemed to get impossibly straighter, tighter, he did not look. “I don’t appreciate that when Ren does it. What makes you think I’ll allow it from you?”

“I don’t understand how you can stop me.”

“Well.” She couldn’t regret the words, not even when he stopped moving. But he didn’t turn directly to her. He had actually paused before a keypad; there he punched in a code too quick for her to follow, even if she’d thought to. “I won’t say it’s impossible. So very few things are.” Now he glanced back to, the door irising open at his side. “But making an enemy of me won’t do you any good.”

“I don’t even know who you are.” Again, the weight of a lie nagged at the edges of her mind, making as little sense as any of this ever could. “But you’re First Order. Which pretty much makes me your enemy anyway.”

“From a certain point of view, yes. Perhaps it does.” One hand rose, fingers smooth and sleek in the fitted glove. “So. Are you coming in?”

It felt as though she would now cross a strange, uncomfortable threshold – and she thought again of Kylo Ren, of the darkness that squirmed through the mess of his mind. Of the thought that lay at its deepest centre: _I must be better_. _I must do what he could not_.

With a hard swallow, Rey pushed all thought of him inside, and stepped into yet another unknown.

The door closed at her back; she could not quite repress a flinch at the sound of its locking. But the man appeared neither to care nor even to notice. Instead he stepped neatly forward, towards the top of a long table. There he pulled out the seat at its head, and then the one to its left. A hand shifted to indicate the latter.

“Will you?”

On Jakku, Rey did deals mostly on her feet. Still she’d been often forced to look up to the one who held power over both the price, and life it would permit her to lead. She took the seat slowly, watched him do the same.

Then, there came silence, again. Rey took no shame in staring openly at the man, taking in both his fine-boned features and the blaze of his unusual hair. Even seated, the perfect lines of his uniform held true, his posture parade-perfect. Everything about him was utterly alien to her lifestyle on a desert planet. All she’d ever had were rough clothes fashioned from whatever scraps she’d managed to claim for her own.

She’d formed the thought before she spoke it. “I don’t even know your name.”

Steepling fingers before chin, he settled his eyes upon her. They’d seemed grey, out there in the corridor; in here, they had turned far greener. Somehow the colour made her heart ache. “Can’t you pick that up out of my head?” he asked, and she fought back sudden hysterical laughter.

“It doesn’t work that way.” Not that she really knew that. His knowing gaze seemed to suggest he knew as much, too. When she spoke next, it was through lips both numb and flat. “So, who _are_ you?”

“Does it matter?”

Her patience snapped like a dry desert twig. “Of course it matters!”

Though she’d taken to her feet, he remained in his chair. “We don’t have a lot of time,” he said, careful even as he stared up at her. “Though Ren succeeded in capturing _you_ , it wasn’t the objective of the mission to Takodana.” His eyes seemed to widen, their colour a strange and sudden blue. “We are tracking the Resistance, and we will find them. Have no doubt of that.”

Nausea twisted in her gut, began to lurch up into the stricture of her throat. The thought of BB-8, of Han and Chewbacca, of _Finn_ —

“I’m not going to help you to hurt them.” Her voice rose to almost a shout. “I don’t even know where they are!”

“I believe you.” The mild reply left her too startled to speak, not that he allowed her space enough to do so. “There’s something else I want from you. And as I said, we haven’t the time to argue about semantics. I will have to report to Snoke as soon as I have the location of the Resistance base.”

The casual cruelty of it had her stomach twisting all over again. “You think I’d just let that go.”

“Why not?” Genuine curiosity gentled his features, his voice. “You don’t know them. You’re from Jakku.” Now he frowned, fleeting and thoughtful. “In a way, you and I have more in common.”

She didn’t bother to keep the indignant slant to her tone. “What’s _that_ supposed to mean?”

“It means, I have plenty of ghosts of my own – and their graves are all on that damned planet.” It wasn’t only his words that seemed odd; Rey felt too a spike in his aura, bitter and cold. Again there was a peculiar sensation of familiarity. Yet before she could make anything of it, he waved a hand, drawing her attention back to the solid and the rational. “But that doesn’t matter. Even the Resistance doesn’t matter right now. I don’t need you to find them, and I don’t need your permission to destroy them.”

The sheer venom of the words rocked her core. “Then what _do_ you need from me?” she demanded. He only gave a slight shrug, as if she were a fool to need to ask.

“I want to know who you are.”

It startled a laugh from even her tight throat. “You already know this is pointless.” Something close to hysteria tinged her words now, though she almost kept it to herself. “Because even I don’t know who I am!”

“So I’ve gathered.” Leaning back in his chair, he shook his head. “But Ren’s methods are not my methods.”

One hand moved beneath the table; Rey tensed immediately, her own hands pressed hard and flat against the mirrored surface of the table. The man gave her a mild look, and then had the gall to actually _tsk_.

“Relax.” A slim case had appeared in his hand, withdrawn from one of the unseen pockets of his greatcoat. It seemed too small to be a weapon. Rey had however long ago learned the simple lesson that things were rarely what they seemed to be.

“What is that?”

“A way of taking a genetic sample.” Snapping the case open revealed a long glass tube, nestled delicately in a bed of soft material. She almost fancied she could see the reflection of it in those cold, ever-changing eyes. “I’m very curious about where you come from, Rey of Jakku.”

Her throat felt very dry when she tried to swallow down her renewed unease. “You seem to have a bit of an obsession with that place.”

“As I said, we both have connection to that cursed rock.” Again, his distaste came through clear, copper-coloured hair almost silvered by the harsh white light of the conference room. His eyes stayed blue as he fixed them now upon hers. “In a way, it formed both of us.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She summoned great dignity with which to say so, though she surrendered to petulance a beat later. “Also, I really don’t care.”

With a humourless chuckle, he closed those gloved fingers about the sampling device, held it up. “Shall we, then?”

Rey felt dirty even saying the next words. “What’s in it for me?”

An approving glint entered his pale eyes, which only made her feel worse. “I can tell you who you are.”

“Bantha shit.”

An eyebrow arched high, though he must have heard far worse as a military brat. “Hardly the words of a well-raised young lady,” he observed, and she snorted.

“What tipped you off? The scavenging? Or just being from your beloved Jakku?”

“I don’t think you’re from Jakku.” Rolling the tube between his fingers, he clarified, “At least, that wasn’t where you were born.”

“I knew that already,” she replied, sharp in her impatience. “My parents left me there.” The caveat that followed, involuntary but always spoken, tasted bitter in her mouth. “But they said they were coming back.”

“In my experience, the words of one’s parents are hardly the most reliable.” Again, she felt that abrupt shift in his aura: of something deep, dark, a shadow more dogged than even one thrown by the purest light. “But we can find their secrets, even without their immediate presence.”

Focusing upon the sampler alone was the only way to quash down the traitorous flare of hope. “If you can tell me,” she said, very carefully, “then why couldn’t anybody else? I could get a genetic profile anywhere.”

“Not at the price I’m offering.” Tapping the delicate thing upon the opened box, he gave a much more exaggerated shrug. “But then, I suppose I don’t know the annual salary of a scavenger girl in an Imperial junkyard. Maybe you can afford to have it done any day of the year.”

Pursing her lips barely contained the salty bite of tears. Yet there was no point to giving into them. She had learned a long time ago not to waste the moisture.

“Maybe I couldn’t get it done today,” she said, holding onto her dignity by only her fingernails, “but one day. For sure.”

“Yes, but it’s not just the price I’m offering that makes this offer so unique.” That faint amusement had returned again; it reminded her of desert felids, of how they toyed with their prey in the dreaming hours of dusk and dawn. “You’ve heard something of our Stormtrooper programme, I take it.” He paused, purely for the drama of it. “Being that you’ve met FN-2187.”

“His name is Finn.”

The flat words earned another brief shrug of slim shoulders; he didn’t seem terribly disappointed by her failure to rise to his bait. “I imagine you have no idea of how large an army we have, but suffice it to say: every single one of them has been genetically profiled. And they come from many worlds, and not all of them out here on the Rim.” For a moment he seemed distracted, caught in another thought entirely. “We have…specific interests, you see.”

Those “specific interests” had surely been the great red beam that had slashed through five planets, one after the other. Rey closed her eyes, but even there burned the memory of Kylo Ren and his crimson blade.

When she opened them again, she had never felt so tired.

“Are you really that sure you can work out where I’m from?”

“I wouldn’t be asking, otherwise.”

“But _why_ are you asking?” For some reason she thought again of Finn, of his desperation to be anywhere but near the First Order. “What do I matter, to you?”

The tilt of his head seemed carefully practiced; it gave her that feeling, again, of something suppressed. Of something unsaid. “Ren finds you irresistible.” And he snorted. “It takes rather a lot, you see, to rouse his interest like that.”

Her head bowed, but she couldn’t repress the sound that rose from her throat: something like a sob, something like a scream. His _interest_ had been in strapping her down, in mocking her life, of invading her mind. There she had been utterly helpless before first the mask, and then before the man.

And this man spoke of it as if it were the most banal thing he could imagine. “You’re doing this to get one step ahead of him,” she said, low, her hands a blur before stinging eyes.

“Yes.”

When she looked up, she found him gazing back. As if everything could really be that simple. “Are you actually going to let me go?”

“Did I ever say that I was?”

Hopelessness washed over her in vicious wave, for all she had never known the ocean. Though the door remained closed, she turned towards it anyway. “I’m leaving now.”

He only sighed, impatient and long-suffering, as if she were but a child refusing to finish the meal set before her. “You must understand that I personally have little interest in you. Indeed, I think Ren was a fool for pursuing you and not the droid.” He could have been speaking of the weather. “Though in the end, it likely doesn’t matter. We’re still going to destroy the Resistance.”

“I’m _leaving_.”

Rey had made it halfway across the room before registering the click of an unholstered blaster. She reached for the door anyway, closing her eyes as she did so. Working her will upon inanimate objects still felt as alien as it did familiar – not that she had the chance to do so now. The pain in her neck preceded the bang of its firing, and she felt herself slipping to the floor. A hand closed about her waist even as she raised a hand to her neck, found no wetness, no blood, just—

“A paralytic tranquiliser.” He didn’t even have the decency to sound ashamed. “I told you I needed that sample.”

Drawing a shuddering breath, she turned the full force of her fading energy on him. “You’re a murdering bastard.”

That look crossed his features, again: a storm that passed instead of breaking, disappearing to lie in wait for another day. “You’re exactly right on both counts, I’m afraid.”

Even as the lethargy in her limbs began to take full hold, Rey fought the losing battle. Already her mind beckoned her towards welcome sleep, even as she knew no true rest awaited her there. But she could do nothing as he took her arm, readying the sampler.

“You’ll never win,” she slurred, and he depressed the plunger. In hazy hate she watched him withdraw it again, blood spurting into the delicate glass filigree like crimson lace.

“I think you’ll find I play a long game,” he replied, and straightened up. She could only watch from the cold hard floor as he shook his head. “Sleep well, Rey of Jakku.” Now his face turned dark, lips curled in distaste. “So says Armitage, ruined as he was by the same damned place.”

Rey had no answer as she slipped under, and was lost.

*****

She startled back into sudden life, the transition as abrupt now as it had been when she’d first fallen. Sitting upright proved a mistake; her head ached, world spinning around her like a starfighter sim locked in a death spiral. Bowing her head made her stomach heave with nausea, for all she had nothing there to bring up. Only with great trouble did she rise to hands and knees. For a long moment she paused there, breath ragged, arrhythmic beat of her heart ringing in her ears. She could taste desperation upon her dry tongue, the bitter metallic combination of salt and of blood.

It seemed far too long before her gut soothed enough to allow her head to rise again. She hadn’t gained enough equilibrium to stand, but she did it anyway, swayed dangerously to one side. Bracing herself against the nearest wall, she blinked blurred eyes, tried to take in her surroundings.

Within a few second it became apparent the man – _Armitage_ – hadn’t moved her, though she would have been surprised to find he could even lift her weight. Nothing told her that this was not the same conference room they had originally entered, though she suspected most rooms in the complex would be as bland and indistinguishable. It didn’t matter. She had no sense of how much time had passed, but she was alone, and she doubted Armitage had planned for her to wake like this.

She only allowed herself the briefest consideration of why she had woken now. It could have been the Force, but then it was just as likely to be nothing more than pure dumb luck. Either one felt fine by her. She certainly wasn’t going to get picky about it now.

Still, when she came to the locked door, she knew then which it was. Without thought her palm moved upward, came to lay flat on the keypad. She could not be entirely sure what she was doing; it felt to be more muscle memory than intentioned action. But she could not help but think of the sword hilt she had found on Takodana. Of the way Kylo Ren had pressed into her mind, drawing her into his own even as he had done so. Of that sensation of whispering voices who spoke about things she could not quite hear, let alone understand.

The keypad gave an angry spark beneath her hand. A second later and the door stood open, corridor inviting her beyond its frame. She didn’t stand around to marvel. There seemed little point in even glancing around. The certainty that she had to move had been settled in her gut since the moment she had woken. That didn’t mean she had any idea of how to get off this planet.

Jakku had been a thorough – if unkind – instructor. Even as she pressed forward her mind began to work through various scenarios, seeking out the most useful, discarding the least likely. She would need a hangar of some sort, certainly – and she could only hope she was moving away from what must have been a detention complex. Her hands clenched lightly as she wished she had some kind of weapon. But such futile thoughts were only so much wasted energy; Rey had better things to focus on now.

She kept ever moving, silent and swift; she sent up a sarcastic thanks to the absent Armitage, in that his soporific didn’t have any lasting effect. It seemed fortunate, too, that this particular area of the base was largely quiet. In a way it was almost too east to avoid two or three loose knots of patrolling ‘troopers. She didn’t allow herself to imagine Finn in that prison of plasteel armour. Instead she admitted to herself she might be travelling in circles, and stopped dead.

_Finn_.

She turned slightly, found herself studying a door that she _might_ seen before. The complex held so little individuality, so little in the way of landmarks, that there was no way to tell either. Pressing her lips together, Rey just barely held in a shriek of frustration – but she couldn’t help striking out with a hand instead, palm smacking hard against the locked keypad. It didn’t give the irritated denial she expected. Instead it slid open, revealing an equally startled person behind its bulk—

“ _Finn_?”

One large hand closed over her mouth as he yanked her forward, the door closing so quick she felt its sharp breeze even in the cool air. But she couldn’t even protest, eyes wide, heart bursting with sudden joy to see both Finn and Chewbacca.

But the hunted expression in Finn’s dark eyes said this reunion was anything but perfect.

“Quiet!” he whispered, fierce, hard. Even as she stared only at him, joy bubbling up inside her heart to flow through everything inch of her, he nodded his head to one side. The tone stayed low and grim. “Look down there.”

She didn’t, not at first. Instead she cast a quick glance around, realised that they stood upon a walkway circumnavigating some sort of cylindrical chamber. From her memories of the downed star destroyers she had scavenged her way through, it likely had something to do with a large weapon – some sort of venting structure, perhaps. Besides where they stood, numerous catwalks crisscrossed its diameter, and on one—

Every inch of her seemed pulled taut and tight, and yet she still could ask a question she already knew the answer to.

“Is that Kylo Ren?”

“And Han Solo.” Even as her gaze skipped over to the older man, heart stuttering again – only in horror this time – Finn revealed he had one last bombshell to detonate.

“That’s his son.”

“I—” One hand reached out, as if that alone could stop the world falling out from underneath her feet. Glancing down again at the two men, she swallowed back her nausea, her rising panic. “He shouldn’t be down there! Not alone with _him_.”

“No kidding.” With a roll of his eyes Finn added, “You want to go tell him that?” A second later he grabbed her arm, reeling her back in before she’d made it even two feet. “I didn’t mean it!”

“Finn, we can’t leave him down there!”

At this distance, they had no hope of hearing anything of the conversation between them. Still Rey strained to do so, noting with horror how close Solo had come to Kylo Ren – to his _son_. “What are we supposed to do?” she whispered, frantic now. “We have to do something!”

“Rey.” His eyes were so dark in the dim light. “Chewbacca said even he couldn’t stop him. I guess he just—”

The ignition of the blade cut through her mind as harshly as it did Han Solo’s chest. Her hand flew to her mouth, the agony unexpected and deep. “No!”

She was a fool to scream, but in the end it hardly mattered. With a roar Chewbacca raised his bowcaster, the shot blasting free before Kylo Ren could even look up. Rey had but the briefest afterimage of Kylo Ren bowed forward, staggering, hand pressed close to his side – and then Finn closed his hand around hers, pulling her again. She couldn’t complain. They were together, now, running in pell-mell catastrophe even as she felt the weight of eyes on her back.

_He knows I’m here_.

She would have gone with Finn even had he not known the way out. But his familiarity with the base proved miraculous, steps fast and sure as he towed her through the maze of corridors. She saw none of it, registered nothing of their journey. What had passed but moments ago had been seared into her memory. Again and again, she saw only what Kylo Ren had done: the saber. The shove. The way Solo’s body had fallen. The sting of her eyes blurred not one second of it – and she didn’t know if her tears were of sorrow, or simple purest fury.

At first she didn’t notice Chewbacca did not follow. Only when the floor rocked with one, two, three, _four_ explosions did it make sense. Solo was dead. But Chewbacca would not leave without doing what they had come to do.

“This is the weapon, isn’t it,” Rey said, gasping. “ _This_ is what killed all those people.”

“Starkiller.” His face burned in grim profile, hand so very tight around her own. “And we’re getting off this bastard planet before it takes us down with it.”

The snow came as an unwelcome shock: her feet were first wet, then cold, then completely without feeling, all in the space of ten steps. Finn did not slow. With gritted teeth, Rey only pushed harder to keep up with his martial stubbornness.

But not even such forced tunnel vision could mask the terrible truth. All around them the world had begun to grow dark, ground rumbling in ominous unease beneath their feet, as if some great beast had turned uneasily over in its spasming womb. Whatever Chewbacca had done to the so-called Starkiller, it had worked. It only left to be seen what time he had left them to escape his handiwork.

In the encroaching darkness, Rey gave over her trust to the hope that Finn knew where they were going. Focused entirely upon him, she did not even sense _his_ presence until it hit her like a pod racer, hard and low in her abdomen. She didn’t even realise she had been thrown into the air until the tree trunk arrested her flight, sending her sprawling to the hard packed snow beneath her.

Only faintly did she register Finn’s voice, the frantic press of cold fingers against her face. Every muscle in her body had drawn in upon itself in screaming constriction, throat raw and frozen. She could not even open her eyes, but the sound of plasma ignition could never have been mistaken for anything else.

She would have cried out, had she any voice left to do so. Yet Finn was so gentle as he laid her down, even as she wished to do nothing but reach out her hand, take his own, and drag him back down to her side.

_Finn!_ Anguished, she tried to send her words directly to his mind, failed. _Finn, **don’t**!_

But he had risen: and now she could just barely make him out as she struggled relentless against agony, fighting for a freedom that felt so very far away. And there she paused, again – for in his dear hands, there blazed the sound of a twinned ignition. Even in the haze of snow and darkness, the bright blue of it burned, a beacon only the brave or the stupid could ever think to follow.

Solid and sure, he stood alone before Kylo Ren. “Come and get it,” he growled in return to words Rey had never heard, and then he threw himself forward and away.

The sound of roused battle came fierce at first, but it did not last; Finn, the darling idiot, had chosen to lead Kylo Ren away from her. Even in her rising horror she loved him for it. But she could not stay here. Her arm ached as she tried to roll on her side, to push herself up. She did not think it broken, but she still clenched back a scream between her teeth as she stopped, drew another gasping deperate gasp of thinning oxygen.

Only then did she see the dark boots stood before her. At first she assumed it only hallucination, but she knew better even before her eyes leapt upwards. There she found familiar long flowing coat, a belt-buckle of impossibly high shine, a high collar beneath stiff lips, an uncovered head crowned with flame-coloured hair.

_Armitage._

Even as she tried to spit out a suitable profanity, her fury tripped over a tongue that felt overlarge: it was little more than a dried up slug in her mouth. He didn’t care. “Get _up_ ,” he said, and from the impatience – the frank _frustration_ – of the words, she figured it wasn’t the first time he’d spoken them to her.

“ _Can’t_ ,” she managed, not that he appeared to care. With an unintelligible sound of frustration he reached down, grasped her about the arm, yanked her to her feet. The world tilted, uneven beneath her unsteady weight: but as it lurched again, she had the sensation that time had become very, very short.

The shout of pain had her instantly alert, turning from Armitage to see that the battle had circled back around to its starting point. But all had changed, now, her protector needing protection. Kylo Ren loomed like a horror from a night terror, saber ablaze like burning blood – and before him lay Finn, silent and so very, very still.

The scream rose in her like brutal storm. “No!” She didn’t care in the slightest that it had Kylo Ren turning to her like a creature trapped in a tractor beam. Yet he did not immediately plough his indomitable way towards her. Instead, he too turned very still, almost as silent as Finn himself.

“What are you doing here?” Even with the distance, the snow, the wind, the dying screams of the planet: Rey heard it perfectly well. But he had not spoken to her. From his frozen presence at her side, it seemed Armitage knew the exact same thing.

She let her own eyes fell again to Finn, who had yet to move at all. With hands clenched together, aching and stiff in the cold air, she knew she hated these two men more than she had ever chosen to hate anything before. She didn’t know what was between them. Frankly she didn’t much care. Her attention had now instead been drawn to something far more important, not far from where Finn lay.

There, upright in the snow like a wayfayer’s journey marker, was the hilt she had found at Takodana. The one that had called to her then. That called to her _now_.

She felt his attention whip back to her, thrusting a sudden hand out. She echoed the motion entirely by instinct. It did not matter that she knew not why she did it. But then, she _did_ – nothing felt so natural as the pull of the saber hilt, and the welcome heaviness of it in her hand.

Rey looked not back. She looked only forward, the hilt oddly warm as she shifted her fingers for better grip. Her staff would have been preferable, but it would do. It didn’t matter that she felt Armitage had turned behind her, had chosen now to make his exit.

But it mattered to Kylo Ren.

“Where are you going?”

Armitage did not answer his demand. “You couldn’t have just _come_ with me,” he muttered instead, words bitter and slightly too high. “I know who you are, you idiot girl.”

That had her turning, mouth half-opened on the demand for truth. There came no chance for him to give it to her, even had she been inclined to believe he’d actually do so. Instead the white clouds of his exhaled breath cut off as if a valve had been turned, hands flying to his throat. In turn his eyes grew very wide already darkening with both blood, and an odd kind of betrayal Rey could never hope to understand.

As he crashed down upon his knees, she turned back, hand hard about the alien hilt. Kylo Ren stood there in forbidding silhouette, one hand extended, fingers pinching tight together. The saber at his side crackled and chortled, ignited and aflame, reflecting fierce crimson upon the blue-white snow.

“This ends here.”

Choking noises had begun behind her now, strangled and desperate. Looking back, Rey found Armitage had hunched over himself, one hand still to his neck, the other scrabbling helplessly in the snow beneath him. Returning her gaze to Kylo Ren, she saw his dark eyes fixed only upon the fallen officer. With that bright hair hanging in his face, wheezing sharpening to faint whistle, Rey knew Armitage would not last much longer.

Her own hand flew out, power skipping through flesh and bone like unleashed plasma. Armitage arched upward, backward – and there he toppled, falling heavy on one side. His breath had returned in whooping gasps, and Rey lingered for only the most dispassionate of moments; there was no time now to look to the two men helpless in the snow. Instead she focused her full attention upon Kylo Ren, and almost smiled to see the sheer shock and fury upon his face.

“How are you _doing_ this?!”

With both hands steady around its full length, Rey raised the saber to shoulder height. “I don’t know.” Her thumb hit the trigger as though she’d done it a thousand times before. “But just watch me do it.”

The terror of the battle passed by her as if a blur. In past scraps, she had felt as though time slowed: as if she could take impossible time to consider her moves, to analyse those of her opponents, to act and react and guide herself to victory or safety or both. But the saber proved nothing like her staff – and Kylo Ren was like no other foe she had ever fought before.

In some ways she was near helpless in the face of his sheer strength, his limitless fury. But she had anger of her own – and also a friend to protect. She also clung tight to her one advantage: every movement for him seemed clear agony. If she could but wear him down—

But as he forced her ever back, hope began to leech away. Sometimes it was better to cut and run. But of course it would not be so easy, not with him. Relentless he pursued her through the trench, through the trees. Only when she reached a cliff brutally torn into the very earth itself did she accept she must face him again.

With their sabers locked together he spoke of lessons. Of teaching. She scarcely heard a word of it, eyes falling closed. All of this had been run on instinct. She had moved blindly into a world she knew nothing of, trusting in others to see for her. But not now. Not any longer. For the first time, amongst the whispers in her mind, she heard her own voice.

_I will not let him do this to me_.

Fury drove her forward, drove her every stroke. Beneath such onslaught he seemed shockingly defenceless. She didn’t care. The red haze of her rage did not pass until Kylo Ren lay before her, face cleaved and cauterised. From there on his back he stared up at her, dark eyes sheened both with pain and with something like defeat.

It seemed almost poetic, when it came: the rift opening between them, scoured into the earth of this cursed planet. As she stared across the widening gulf, she felt: nothing. Not relief. Not the bittersweet aftertaste of revenge taken. Only when she thought of Finn did her heart jolt back into proper beat. Turning, frantic as she tried to gain her bearings in a world dissolving around her, she realised they had come full circle.

Stepping through the snow on feet she hadn’t been able to feel in what seemed hours, Rey returned to where they had started. Finn lay there as she had left him, and then – there lay Armitage, too. He moaned in the snow, voice ragged and muffled. But Finn remained motionless. Falling to her knees, she scrambled frantically over his chest, his throat, seeking a pulse even as she could not stop trembling. In answer he moved beneath her, though only slightly: his face was a study in pain.

When the light shone down upon them, she figured it was death come to claim its prize. The truth only made her tears fall faster: the _Falcon_ hovered above them, ramp falling, Chewbacca, thundering down its length. Without words he bent down, gathering Finn into his great arms as though he weighed little more than a single grain of sand.

Getting to her own feet proved almost too much, calves and thighs screaming, shoulders locked and tight. A glance back told her there was nothing to see of Kylo Ren. But Armitage remained, trapped on their side by the whimsies of fate.

She had no idea why she did it. She took one gloved hand, pulled up so hard she might had dislocated a shoulder. “Get _up_ ,” she shouted. “Do you want to die here?”

His half-glazed eyes struggled to settle on hers, too bright in his mottled red face. “What are you _doing_?”

“I have no idea.” Gritting her teeth, she closed her hand about his wrist instead. “Get on the ship.”

His eyes darkened to near black. “Let me go.”

“No.” She did let him go, but only so she could grab him under the arms. “You have something I want. And I’m going to get it.”

He proved heavier than she’d expected. Still, even with her limited strength, he seemed far worse off. As they cleared the ramp it immediately began to close; Rey let him go, slumping exhausted to the floor. Finn was nowhere in sight, though Chewbacca had obviously returned to the pilot’s seat. The whole ship shuddered around them, first taking to the air and then hitting atmosphere with a dizzying velocity. She needed to go to him. But first she braced herself as they hit lightspeed.

Across the passageway Armitage stared at her, utterly aghast. “What have you _done_?”

Her stomach gave another unhelpful lurch as she looked back to the closed door. The lightsaber shifted with her weight as she moved again to hands and nears, heavy at her hip. “What I needed to do,” she said, breathless, hoarse.

And then she threw up.


	2. Chapter 2

Taking in the ship around him, Hux curled a lip, reminded abruptly of the junkers of his childhood. Those Imperial remnants had always walked a thin and deadly line, forever just a moment from their collapse and his own annihilation. Being given command of the _Finalizer_ had been about more than rank and power. Her fine and beautiful design spoke to his own dogged survival, even as he’d been ordered to share said command with one who had never known deprivation of the sort Armitage Hux had been reared on.

Pushing to his feet, he winced; though the bulk of his pain radiated from his bruised and aching throat, the girl had been none too gentle in dragging him aboard. It didn’t help that he now recognised his surroundings as the damned ship that had crashed onto Starkiller. With one gloved hand he reached forward, but did not quite lay it upon its bulkhead. He’d never seen the cursed vessel in person. He still knew it far better than anyone in his position had any right to.

The sound of a saber lighting behind him struck him hard: knees turned weak, abdomen tight and taut. He knew the sound of that weapon. The sound of _Ren’s_ weapon, now turned upon Hux himself.

But even before he turned, he knew himself for a fool. Its smooth hum alone identified it as a weapon far more stable than anything Kylo Ren possessed. The plasma itself also pulsed so very blue, and so very _bright_. Fighting the urge to squint, Hux stared down the metaphorical barrel before raising his eyes to meet hers. This was not how he’d planned his day. But already his mind turned over new plans, strategising his next clear move.

“I don’t know why I saved you,” she said, immediately – though she didn’t have a harsh enough edge to sound threatening. In truth she sounded almost _apologetic_. Hux had to laugh, no matter how much it hurt. Excess oxygen was a luxury his bruised throat could scarce allow.

It took a long moment before he could soothe the spasms of his larynx into allowing actual speech. “I know why,” he rasped. “I know who you are.”

The lightsaber wavered, then held firm. “I could take you back. To the Resistance.”

“I’m sure you could.” Still he smiled. “But I’ll never tell you, if you do.”

With lips pursed, Rey held the blade now steady. “You’re probably just bluffing.” It sounded more like she needed to convince herself. “You don’t know anything.”

“On the contrary, I probably know too much.” With difficulty, Hux shifted enough to reach into his greatcoat. At her immediate step closer, he rolled his eyes. “It’s just this. My datapad.”

She still eyed it as if it might explode at any moment. “You have the genetic scan on it?”

“I do.” Even with the hoarseness of it, Hux managed to imbue his voice with sharp command. “But you won’t get it, not without me. It’s biometrically sealed, and code-locked. You’d need me alive to open it.” A pause, and he added, “Alive _and_ willing, as it were.”

“I’m sure the Resistance has slicers.”

“I’m sure they do too.” This time, he smiled utterly without humour. “But they’re not going to break this security.”

With chin tilted high she scoffed, and he had to admire the gall of her. “I’ll risk it.”

“But I won’t.” Lowering his hand, he carefully replaced the datapad in its padded pocket, slid his hand closer to a different one. “Does the pilot know I’m here?”

Though she paused a moment over her answer, he didn’t doubt its veracity. “No.”

“Good.” Nodding down the dingy corridor, he cleared his throat again, set his jaw. “There are smuggling compartments in this ship. Hidden ones. You’re going to put me in one, and tell no-one I’m here.”

“ _What_?”

He’d unholstered the blaster and released the safety before she’d quite registered the movement; with the barrel pushed firm against one temple, he raised an eyebrow. “Do it,” he said, crisp and clear, “or I’ll shoot.”

Her eyes – very wide – darted from the blaster to where it pressed to his own head, then back again. “…you wouldn’t.”

“I damn well would.” Ren’s little stunt might have stripped his voice of its dignity, but it couldn’t do the same to the words themselves. “You think I want to be taken alive? Before the _Resistance_?”

Rey took a long moment to answer. “This is _crazy_.”

“It very much is.” Mild and pleasant, he gave a careless shrug. “I’m sure the pilot is going to come check on you soon. What will it be?”

The war in her raged more obviously than even the most extravagant of Ren’s tantrums. He supposed that shouldn’t surprise him, given the circumstances.

Cursing, she grabbed his arm, pulled him close. “How do you even know there are hidden compartments?”

He just looked her dead in the eye. “Down that corridor. Under the floor panelling.”

The creativity of her cursing this time proved almost poetic; even as a military brat from birth, Hux had to marvel at the breadth and depth of it. Not that she gave him the time to do so; she’d pulled the panel up before he even had to point it out, the darkness below yawning wide.

“You better not cause any trouble down there.”

“I’ll behave.” Coughing to release tight bruised muscle – it helped not a whit – he added, “As long as you remember what I have.”

There was no need to look back to know the battle between her conscience, and her curiosity. Yet another curse – one he filed away for future use himself – and she turned to him with flashing gaze.

“Give me the blaster.”

“No.” He offered the answer polite, easy. “I’m hardly going to shoot you. What good would it do me now?”

Her lips thinned, eyes moving to where she had last seen him stow the datapad. “You could call your ship.”

“Ren just tried to kill me,” he replied, spoken easier in words than in thought. “You think I’ll risk that?”

In the quiet that followed, the ship hummed about them, as if a live creature. But then, with the strange little creaks and groans of hull and mechanics both, it seemed far more alive than the _Finalizer_ ever had.

“He must be dead,” she said at last, almost hushed, almost to herself. Hux didn’t hide the scoff of laughter, raw as it burned.

“Oh, you know he isn’t.” He paused, said lightly, “…don’t you?”

For a moment, Rey let her eyes fall closed. When she opened them again, they had turned very cold. “How do _you_ know?”

The bitter taste of hubris was one he’d never quite accustomed himself to, for all he’d been feasting upon it for years. “I have my ways,” he muttered, then stood straighter still. “Are you going to do this or not?”

Though he’d seen something of her battle with Ren, her speed and strength startled him; within moments, she’d pushed him into the compartment, already sliding it closed. “I’ll know if you try and get out.”

As the last sliver of the light disappeared, he bit down on childish memory. He’d outgrown a fear of the dark long ago. “I believe you,” he replied, and he did. He’d seen enough Skywalker sorcery by now to know better.

Her footsteps, light and purposeful, vanished into the ambient sound of the ship. Completely alone, now, Hux let his hand stray to the datapad, secure in his coat pocket. Somehow it felt bulkier than the blaster he still held in the other. The thought of putting it to his head held a seductive appeal, even considering the fool’s gambit he’d just played and won.

Rey had been right. He could try to contact the _Finalizer_. While this particular ship had had long been renowned as a piece of junk, Hux did not doubt his own engineering prowess. He would be able to slice into the systems from the datapad, piggyback the communication signals of the _Falcon_ , and send an encrypted message to his command crew.

Hux had little illusion about the ultimate fate of Starkiller. Even Snoke himself could not have done anything to stabilise the weapon. But he would never have permitted the loss of his apprentice. Kylo Ren was alive, and by logic alone Hux knew it.

Yet logic alone could never explain the certainty that lurked as a dull ache always in the back of his mind. The new agony of his throat proved a good match for it, bruised and bleeding beneath the tightened skin. For all the distance between them, Ren might as well have wrapped his own hands about his neck and squeezed them to closed fists. Hux knew what he had tried to do, out there in the snow.

Ren had meant to hurt him, and hurt him badly. In truth he might have meant to kill him – and it had been all over the girl. The girl that Hux himself had now made the mistake of getting too interested in.

The weight of his datapad seemed to have quadrupled, the information it held making it far heavier still. But he had gone too far now to turn back. But from Ren’s conversation with her, and the information he’d gleaned himself, the girl would have no answers for him. Neither would Ren himself, if Hux had even felt inclined to ask.

Only one source remained – one that might be able to shed light upon this particular darkness. And that would happen only if he could get close enough to ask. And he would never be able to do that from about the _Finalizer_.

There was nothing else to do now but wait. if early childhood had taught him anything, it was be still and silent. Alone in the compartment space, Hux let his eyes fall closed. He had thoughts enough to mull over for hours yet.

And yet, his mind only circled back to her question: _how do you even know there are hidden compartments?_

Even as he smiled, he could taste salt at the back of his throat, astringent and hard. The memories that brought up, torturous and tautly pulled across his mind, were not even entirely his own. That didn’t make them hurt any less.

“Are you still in there?”

Starting, Hux blinked in the darkness, found still nothing there to see. Still, when he spoke, he left it as a careless drawl. “Why, where else would I be?”

“Don’t get smart.” A pause, then she added, “And don’t get that blaster out. I have my lightsaber.”

It was somewhere between mocking and curious when he asked, “Do you even know how to use it?”

“Kylo Ren sure thinks so.”

He hadn’t seen much of the fight, lying half-unconscious in the snow while she’d kicked his ass. Still, he seen enough to know she’d certainly kicked it hard. “Point taken.” Even as the compartment opened, he added with false hoarsened cheer, “Fear not, I’m not fool enough to shoot anything but myself in a ship this size.”

Suspicion displayed itself strong on her weary face all the same. He didn’t think she herself would hesitate to fire on him, explosive decompression be damned. But then, she had apparently made fast friends with a power Hux could only dream of influencing.

And now she held one hand out, the other on the hilt of the lightsaber. “Give me your blaster.”

“Why? What difference would it make?”

“ _Armitage_.”

The strange novelty of his rarely-spoken given name couldn’t be denied. In fact, it almost seemed appropriate; he had largely only ever heard it spoken in the voices of women. Taking the blaster from its holster, he gave it over. While she didn’t ask about any other weapons his uniform might conceal, neither did he volunteer the information.

She spoke again only after stowing the blaster in the leathers that encircled her hips and waist. “So.” Apprehension shimmered bright, harsh. “Chewbacca doesn’t know you’re here, he’s in the cockpit. Finn’s stable. Not that you care?”

He blinked, just once. “Not particularly, no.”

Though it seemed obvious she had more to say on that particular subject, she bit it back with a grimace. “It’s time for you to keep your end of the bargain.”

A snort, a wave of one gloved hand, and he almost smiled to see her incredulous look. “Not yet.”

“What?”

“We’re not where I need to be yet.” As she continued to stare at him like he’d grown a second head, he added with feigned patience, “Ren wanted the map to Luke Skywalker.”

“…what, and now _you_ want it?”

“Not precisely.” How he hated how thin his voice sounded now, warped as it had been by Ren’s damned sorcery. “I want you to take me to him.”

The startled expression made her look no more than ten years old; for a moment, Hux had a very good idea of what she’d looked like as a small child. “…what makes you think I can do that?”

“The Resistance got the droid back. Presumably they have the map, and they’re going to send someone to retrieve him.” Raising an eyebrow, he opened his hands, flawless logic. “I think they’ll send you.”

And yet her voice broke over the words. “They don’t even _know_ me!”

He almost pitied her that. His own childhood had been a total ruin from the moment of his very conception, and yet – he honestly pitied _her_ , now. “Who else would make sense?” To his credit, he didn’t even choke on the next words. “The Force chose you.”

“What do _you_ even know about the Force?”

The viciousness of those words rolled off him like oil over water; he could hardly resent her this. “More than I care to.” But he did not dwell there long; he was out of the dark of the compartment and his mind, and he had light enough to do what he must. “I need to speak to Luke Skywalker. And you need the information I have.”

Again she stared at him, eyes perfectly wary. He’d seen that sort of expression on many a young face, brought before him after they’d been taken from an annexed planet and given over to a new life in the Order.

“I’m starting to doubt you have it at all.”

“Don’t.” He even managed slight kindness. “You may believe me a lackey of the Order, but I don’t lie.”

“I don’t believe you.”

And he shrugged, even as the movement tugged on his aching neck. “Then summon the pilot. Wake the traitor. Call the Resistance and tell them I’m here.” Folding his arms now, he kept his spine straight and his nose high. “I won’t give them anything. And you’ll get nothing of what you want from me.”

One chapped lip caught hard under her teeth. “…I don’t even know that they’ll let me go to him. Maybe they’ll just tell me to wait until he comes back.”

“What if he won’t?” He’d never have the compulsion of the Force. But he’d been orator long enough to urge people to action. “Take a chance, Rey. Just like I’m doing.”

She actually laughed, a strange and snorting thing. “Yeah, you don’t look like the type to take chances.”

“I’m not.” He wasn’t smiling at all. “Funny how things change.”

In the silence that followed she only watched him, thoughtful and long. He allowed the appraisal but kept his silence, and his eyes on her. Eventually she shook her head, looked away.

“…Kylo Ren knew you.”

“He did.”

Glancing back, the question came sharp as any vibroblade. “What do you _do_ in the Order?”

His smile was bland, perfect propaganda. “I’m an officer.”

“What kind of officer?”

An impatient sigh, and he rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “Rey. Are we doing this or not?”

For a moment he thought he’d overplayed his hand – that she had changed her mind. That she could live without knowledge of her parentage now that she had a true and tangible destiny. It shouldn’t have surprised him as much as it did. Kylo Ren had always been the same.

“I’ll have to lock you in there,” she said, sudden. But then her face flushed brilliant sudden red, the gritty rebel replaced by an uncertain girl. “Do you like…need…”

He smiled thinly in return. While he’d trained his bladder long ago, even he had his limits. “Yes.” And he cocked his head sideways, towards the cockpit. “Did the pilot tell you how long the trip will be?”

She followed his gaze; he could see in her eyes she still longed to know how he knew the basic geography of a ship he’d never seen before. “Half a day, maybe.” And she frowned. “I guess I can get you some rations. Maybe some bacta, if there’s any to spare.”

“That’s the least of my worries.”

The words brooked no argument. “I’ll find something.” But she faltered over the next. “…and I’ll see. About Skywalker.”

“You want to do this.” He spoke serious, low. “I can assure you of that.”

Pushing to her feet, she only shook her head, studiously avoided meeting his gaze. “Let’s get this over with.”

*****

The ship had been a hive of activity after it had first touched down at the Resistance base only when the last of the voices had died long away did Hux set about his own landing procedures. Rey had weighted the door down with something she’d dragged out of one of the more conventional cargo bays. Hux shifted it by bracing his legs and shoving upward. Long practice meant it was more difficult to keep him in small enclosed spaces than even a wary scavenger girl might think.

There were a thousand other places he could go, or more. Yet Hux found himself instead in the empty cockpit, silent, thoughtful. He didn’t take a seat – either as pilot or as support. The mechanics of flight held no mystery to him; he knew how to fly, both practically and as an engineer. But this was not his place. This was not how this would end.

He’d never been given to sentiment. Perhaps a different childhood would have allowed him to be, but such opportunity had long been lost. But as he trailed gloved fingers along the primary navigation panel, he could not help but imagine a different reality. One without war, without siege, without evacuation, without exile. In that place, this would be _their_ place. Ben and Armie, seated in the cockpit together as the _Falcon_ lurched forward into ever more ludicrous adventures.

Even as he swore softly, even as he closed his eyes, neither action did anything to chase such foolishness away. It only blurred it together with real memories of encounters shared in the Silencer that Hux had specifically tailored for Ren’s tastes and talents. But the cockpit of the _Falcon_ would be roomier. Lighter. Here their two bodies might meet in ways less violent. In ways with more laughter.

“You shouldn’t be in here.”

Opening his eyes, Hux didn’t look back. “I likely shouldn’t be here at all.”

A sigh said more than words ever could, and she spoke again only after sitting down heavily in one of the rear seats.

“You were right.”

Now he turned, one pale eyebrow in unimpressed arch. “Of course I was.”

An impatient huff, and Rey slouched down low with arms folded across her breasts. He’d known she was young, but the childishness startled him. Even after five years in the company of Kylo Ren. “They’re sending me to Skywalker.” One might have expected joy from those words. Rey burned instead with frustration. “We’re going in the _Falcon_. As soon as they can make her ready.”

“Because of course you are,” he drawled, and looked away; the sharp snap of her voice drew him back.

“How did you know this would happen?”

“I didn’t.” One hand rose, pushed hard at the temple where a headache lurked; the leather felt cracked, bitter after the snow. “I just draw the obvious and logical conclusions from all the data available to me.” Even as her brow furrowed, he added with careless unconcern, “So you’re not giving me up to the Resistance, then?”

“I should.” The hardened tone very nearly surprised him. “I really, _really_ should.”

When they’d first met, Hux had found Kylo Ren to be less of a threat than he’d imagined. It hadn’t mattered that he knew the young man to be Snoke’s apprentice, the son of a Senator and a General, the progeny of the dark Lord Vader. There had just been something _odd_ about him. Something that reminded him of the children brought to the ‘trooper programme, wide and wild-eyed both. He supposed he shouldn’t be surprised now to see the exact same thing in Rey herself.

“Let me tell you something.” Clearing his throat – less painful now, thanks to even the meagre ration of bacta she’d found for him – he did not take a seat. “You said that your parents abandoned you on Jakku.”

The faintest tremor in her lower lip vanished with the squaring of her jaw. “They said they would come back for me.”

“And yet they didn’t.”

With her lips pressed tight together, her anger shimmered like a weapon primed to fire. “Do you have a point?”

A humourless smile was all he could allow himself. “From the information I’ve gathered, I can assure you that that was never going to happen.” Here he let it hang only for a moment; he was self-aware enough to admit he took mean pleasure in the way she looked to have been slapped. “But it wasn’t their fault.”

The hunger of her demand felt breathtaking. “What do you mean?”

This time, the smile had teeth. “I can’t tell you that.”

“You mean you _won’t_.”

“Yes and no,” he said, and neither was exactly untrue. “But they didn’t abandon you, Rey.”

She hated him for saying that, even as hope blossomed from her in a fashion that even he, Force-null as a Hutt, could feel shivering over his skin. “You can’t know that.”

“Maybe not yet,” he granted. “But I can draw the logical conclusion.”

In the heaviness of the silence that followed, Rey turned her face downward. But she didn’t hide it from him for long; when she looked up, tears shining in her eyes, she remained as defiant as she had ever been. “Damn you,” she said, thickly. And then, harsh and hard: “You’re an asshole.”

Dryly he gave the only reply he could. “So I’ve been told.” As she stood up – he frowned to see the way she wiped her eyes by dragging one forearm across her face – he added sharply, “Do we have a deal?”

“I’m not telling you where he is,” she replied, frowning herself as she began to sweep an appraising eye over the interior. “Or how we’re getting there.”

He leaned now on the pilot’s chair. “I’m not worried about that.”

Strangely, she sounded more curious than disbelieving when she asked, “Then what are you getting out of this?”

“Answers.” Straightening, he only just resisted the urge to fold his hands at the small of his back. “The same as you.”

The calculated look in her eyes felt terribly familiar as she tilted her head now, eyes narrowing. “You want to know more about Ren. About the Force.”

“I do.”

A sigh, and she shook her head, grimacing as she went back to her pre-flight checks. He never had thought to ask what had happened to the traitor Stormtrooper. “We’re probably going to end up killing each other, someday,” she muttered, and he rolled his eyes.

“We’re on the opposite sides of a war. That does happen.”

“But you don’t have to be.” The vehemence of her words struck him like a blow, her hazel-dark eyes fixed now upon him alone. “Kylo Ren tried to kill you. Maybe that’s a sign you should be on our side.”

His smile grew broad, easy and practised. He’d learned its bravado at the literal feet of many a crueller master. “Listen to you! Last week you were a scavenger, now you’re a full-fledged rebel.” And yet his scorn could not mask the hint of weariness, the reminder that well over a decade separated them in age. “It’s really not that simple, Rey.”

“I don’t know about that. Armitage.” Even as he scowled at the use of his given name, she swiped forearm over her forehead, then shook it. “You need to get back in your hole. They’re going to be coming through here soon.”

“How’s the traitor?”

The dark look this earned him felt almost entirely worth it. “Like you care.”

“He could have been great.” And it was no lie, not at all. “Humour me.”

From her expression, she would much rather have thrust an ignited lightsaber through his belly. “He’ll live.” She walked away without so much as a glance to see if he followed, though Hux could not help a look back. Out the front viewport, the Resistance base bustled like an insect hive, strangely ordered for a movement born entirely of chaos.

_A different world_ , he thought with bleak scorn. _A different life_.

Only then did he move to follow her back to the dark.

*****

If he could say anything positive about the Resistance, it had to be that they did work quickly. Rey only paid him one more brief visit for toileting needs and rations before the _Falcon_ left what was presumably D’Qar, course set for whatever bolthole the last Jedi had dug for himself.

They hadn’t long jumped to lightspeed when she returned. As he hefted himself out of the smuggler’s hole, she allowed no preamble. Much as he enjoyed rhetoric, he had to admire that in a person.

“We’re going to have to tell Chewbacca you’re here.” With arms crossed across her chest, again, she tilted her chin upward in defiant command. “The pilot. He’s a Wookiee.”

“Ah.” He hadn’t needed the clarification. He also really did not need the subsequent jump in heartrate at the very thought of doing so. “Han Solo’s partner in crime.”

“Not sure that’s exactly what he goes by, but.” She swallowed hard then, the spasm of sudden pain on her features almost a surprise. “You know that Kylo Ren killed him?” The catch in her voice reminded him of fish he’d seen caught as a child, silver scales dancing in the rare sunlight as they dangled upon their killing hook. “Han, I mean.”

He had been curious about that connection. “Did you know him?”

“A little.” Hardening her voice, she shook her tears away. “I knew him enough.” Taking a deep breath through her nose, she fought to return to her earlier commanding tone. “But we need to talk to Chewbacca.”

His reply came dubious. “You speak Shyriiwook?”

“Is that so strange to you?”

“Yes.” Ren had never admitted to the same, though Hux had long assumed the man would be fluent. For not the first time, he wondered what the alien language would sound like, rumbling in that great deep chest. “Where does an orphaned scavenger on Jakku learn Shyriiwook?” Then, without thinking: “Or did you always know how?”

Her considering look made him regret the words. The girl was obviously a quick study, though with what he now knew, he couldn’t truly be surprised. “ _Should_ I have known it?”

“You learned it, then.”

The pride came through clear, though he couldn’t begrudge her it. “I cobbled together some tech. I liked language programmes. Not exactly a lot to do out there in the desert, on your own.”

“I can imagine.”

By her scowl, she could sense nothing of his reluctant admiration. “I guess that means I’m going to get Chewbacca now, then.” Though she tried still for that casual tone of command, Hux couldn’t miss the pinched lines of worry about her mouth, her eyes. Apparently, a hard life lived on Jakku had not been enough to poison her soul. Some part of him wanted to envy her that. He’d been there only days himself, and that had been more than long enough for the ugliest facets of the place to be burned deep into his being.

Shifting, now, he found himself smoothing his palms over his thighs, as if that would do anything to improve the state of his trousers. Rey had scrounged up some clothes for him so he no longer wore his uniform, but he still wondered if Han Solo’s partner might recognise him. The intelligence they had suggested the Resistance was headed solely by Leia Organa; Skywalker had vanished into exile, and her husband returned to his previous life. But General Armitage Hux of the First Order had headlined enough propaganda to make him wary of what the Wookiee might know.

“Armitage?”

The commitment had been already made. There was no way back from this. “I suppose I ought to meet my host,” he said, rising into loose parade stance. In return Rey gave him a shuttered, even gaze that oddly reminded him of Rae Sloane. Without a word she moved away, leaving him to the low strange hum of an unfamiliar ship he still knew altogether too well indeed.

It couldn’t last long. At first he heard only a clatter, and then: a roar. With a sigh of his own, Hux ran his fingers absently over the sleeve of his right forearm, feeling the outline of the monomolecular blade sheath beneath.

Heavy footfall vibrated through what felt the ship entire, and then he stood there: and the Wookiee stood very tall. But even with his own considerable height, Hux was not unaccustomed to staring upward. He also had experience enough with such matters to stand in dispassionate silence as the creature ranted at him in its beastly language – though it didn’t lay a hand on him. That was different. Even so, in an odd unwelcome way, he could not help but see a resemblance to Kylo Ren.

Rey waited in a tense silence of her own. Only when the Wookiee seemed quite done did she speak. An uneasy flush had crept up her neck and across her cheeks, but she stood straightbacked and stubborn. “He’s not going to turn us around,” she said, lips tight. “But he’s not happy.”

He couldn’t help the arched eyebrow. “You don’t say.”

The Wookiee growled something likely a very choice insult in Shyriiwook. Rey only shook her head. “He understands you have something valuable to me. And…and that you had something to do with Kylo Ren.”

The name felt like a twist in his gut, burning saber pressed deep. “Does that matter to him?” He hadn’t meant to do it, but Hux found his eyes skipping to the Wookiee then, meeting his dark gaze with his own. This time the creature had no words for him. The dark eyes, black as a starless sky, said far more than any language Hux could not speak.

Rey’s sigh spoke for them all. “If you step so much as a toe out of line, he’ll kill you.”

Still he met the Wookie’s gaze, even and unafraid. “I expected no less.”

Yet Hux couldn’t deny the relief that flooded through him as the Wookiee turned to stomp away. “…well, that possibly could have gone worse,” he said, careful as a starship through an asteroid field. “But does it mean I don’t have to sleep in the cargohold?”

“You’re pushing your luck.” She sounded more tired than irritated. “But no. I guess not.”

“How long will it be?”

“Too long. Not long enough. What does time even matter, out here?” Now he could hear frustration, though he strangely doubted she directed it towards him. “Do what you need to. I need…to be somewhere else.”

The corridor felt oddly cold without her presence. For all it was a place he knew, it had never been his.

*****

An ocean world lay beneath the heavy atmosphere they had just broken through, its few landmasses outcrops of rock rising like teeth from the drowned jaw of some great beast. Hux knew better than to ask how they knew which one to land at. He even held his tongue as the Wookiee piloted them to a precarious landing at the foot of a great hill. Yet after they disembarked and he found himself gazing up at the winding rustic staircase hewn from its flanks, he was not quite sure how to mask his dismay.

Rey didn’t even look back: tall and lovely in her grey garments, she wore the saber hilt at one hip, satchel at the other. “You wait here,” she said, and no-one needed to ask to know that she spoke to them both. “I’ll speak to him first.”

“How do you even know he’s here at all?”

“I know.”

A shiver rocked through him, bare hands curling to fists. He hated how he knew this sensation, this display. Ren would appear this exact way, at those moments when he allowed the Force to flood through him. And in those moments he became an alien thing, existing far beyond the realities Hux knew and understood. Beyond comfort. Beyond even sanity.

But she didn’t wait for his approval. He doubted she needed it. That didn’t mean he wouldn’t have preferred not to be left alone with the Wookiee. Though he doubted said Wookiee would tolerate his disappearing from sight, Hux chose to move away, down towards the edge of the uneasy water.

The gravel of the shoreline crunched beneath his boots – those, at least, were still his own. He hadn’t trusted the scavenger to find anything remotely close to his size. His fastidious nature still wept at how filthy they would become here; descending planetside had become a rare event in his duties. Starkiller had been the exception to the rule, but it had become more mechanical than organic as time moved on. Even before then, the majority of his life had been lived upon starships: both the decrepit remnants of his childhood, and the sleek new creations of his adult years. The last time he had spent any real time on-planet had been before the fall of Arkanis.

Here, and now, a strange sense of tranquillity settled over him like a cloak. Utterly unearned by his surroundings, by his situation, it had him smiling bitterly. It was not as if he were safe here. Given Ren’s reaction to him on Starkiller, he likely would not be safe anywhere.

Hux turned his face to the sky, eyes closed. Even though it had been nearly thirty years since he had last stepped foot upon Arkanis, he knew the taste of approaching rain. Of oncoming storm. Instinct of the same sort had been why he’d sought Rey out in the first place. While his relationship with Ren might have ended over a year ago, Hux had not truly begun to accept his loss of influence over the man until recently. Only then did he also understand that Snoke had truly taken Ren from him, and there might be no coming back.

Taking the datapad from a convenient pocket, he turned the sleek thing over and over in his hands in fidgeting fashion. He didn’t turn it on. He didn’t need to, for all he struggled yet to believe the information that it held. But in some ways, it was no struggle at all. In the presence of creatures like Kylo Ren, things so often seemed to come full circle. Hux didn’t need to believe in destiny to know that. Basic natural physics taught him well the fractal nature of the universe. And history always had had a tendency to repeat itself, at least in his own experience.

“Armitage.”

The rising wind burned as he turned to face into it. For all it seemed as if an age had passed, it appeared to have done it without any movement of time at all. “Rey.”

Her colour had turned high, flushed, but somehow he doubted it was just because of the exercise. “I spoke to him.” Stilted, strange, her next words stuttered to a stop. “He didn’t…he doesn’t…”

He ought to have rejoiced at the idea that Luke Skywalker, presumed messiah of all rebellious spirits across the galaxy, apparently didn’t want to be the hero he had once been. Instead Hux only shook his head, wondered when this entire family would stop contributing to his constant low grade migraines. “No. We didn’t come this far to let him walk away.”

“I wasn’t planning to!” she shouted, and Hux actually took an involuntary step backward. Even through the thick leather, the insulated soles, he felt the curiosity of an incoming tide lapping at his heels.

For her part, Rey appeared ashamed by her outburst. “I just…” A deep breath, a frustrated sigh. “He threw it away.”

“Threw what away?”

“My saber.” Her face spasmed, then, an emotion he had no hope of interpreting vanishing before it had even settled. “ _His_ saber. He didn’t want it.”

“Fair enough,” he said, and actually meant every word. “Those things are idiotic, especially when there are far better weapons to fight with.”

Some part of him actually yearned for her to flash back, to spark a brilliant argument to light up all the strange world they now walked upon. Instead she only shook her head, turned away and back to the endless spiralling staircase. “I need to go find it.”

“I’ll go talk to him, then.”

Incredulous, she turned back upon him. “Why do you think he’ll want to talk to _you_?”

“I don’t care if he _wants_ to or not. I have questions for him.” The smile he gave her now was entirely unkind, and he cared not a bit what she thought. “And believe me, you’ll have even more.”

Again, no anger from her. There was something oddly lonely in that as she brushed back loosened hair, pursed her lips. “Come with me to get the saber.” She didn’t wait for his permission, nor even his agreement. “We’ll go back to him together.”

There seemed a strange intimacy in the statement, and one entirely unwelcome. But he sighed, moved to join her once more. “Whatever.”

Their search devolved quickly into a mad scramble over rocky terrain, the plants scrubby and salt-laden. Every moment brought more exercise than he cared to indulge in, even though he regularly used the facilities on the _Finalizer_ to keep his body lean and limber. To make matters worse, the terrain seemed infested with a peculiar avian species that did little to interest him, save for the half-hearted urge to dropkick one off a windswept cliff.

Perhaps, then, it was only fitting that Rey eventually retrieved the damned thing from an empty nest belonging to one of the dull-eyed creatures. As she straightened, silvered thing quiet and still in her curved palm, Hux purposefully turned to contemplating how he might go about plucking one of the nestlings. General though he might, he had never been immune to the realities of desperation, of starvation.

“He’s over there.”

His eyes moved before he could contemplate the wisdom of it – and there, indeed, he stood. An icon, a story, a legend. Now in the flesh, Luke Skywalker stood motionless in long robes, down near one of the roiling rock pools along the coast.

Hux glanced up to the towering spire, then back down again. The meagre content of his gut burned like fuming acid. “How did he even get down there?”

“I don’t know.” Again, her frustration leaned more towards weariness than fury. “There’s a village, up further. We could wait for him there.”

“A village?” The pulse of a growing headache couldn’t help but remind him of many a day spent in the company of Kylo Ren. “What _is_ this place?”

Her tone had turned oddly defiant. “Apparently the first Jedi temple was built here. It’s a sacred place.”

That at least explained the uneasy sensation that had crawled under his skin since he’d first stepped foot here, much as he didn’t care to admit he had any sense of such things. “Who would even want to live in this godsforsaken place? Aside from _him_.”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see them close enough before I came back down to the _Falcon_.”

He couldn’t take even small comfort from such a vague answer, though it wasn’t as if he’d been hoping for much anyway. Following her back up towards said village only confirmed his suspicions. Strange creatures moved amongst stranger structures, wordless about their work. Hux had never much cared for xenos, and made no effort to speak with them. Even had he been inclined to, there seemed little enough to gain from trying; they showed little interest in Rey, ignoring her multilingual efforts to engage their attention.

As nightfall began a quick descent, the two of them ended in an awkward silence before an empty firepit. Stretching out his legs, Hux acknowledged the vaguest sense of hunger; it was easily enough repressed, particularly given he’d always been more sensitive to cold instead. Rey, who likely had less tolerance for the cold than even his skinny hide, stared moodily into the ashes at its centre.

“You’re still here.”

They both turned at the wearied gravel of his voice, Hux’s brow already creasing into a not-quite frown. The man stood shorter than he had expected. Despite his intellectual understanding that decades had passed since his hero days, the greying hair and broader set of the body wrapped in robes also came as something as a shock. The weathered features and tired eyes were just all part of the oddity of it all. But those eyes were also very sharp, and very definitely fixed upon Rey.

Hux stood, stiff and straight, unable to let himself be nothing. To be ignored. “So. You are the great Luke Skywalker.”

The gaze flicked over, unblinking, not quite cold. “And who are you?”

“My name is Armitage.” The next words tasted bitter, like poisoned blood. “I know Kylo Ren.”

He’d hardly been the most open of individuals to begin with, but the name seemed an incantation; with shuttered gaze he looked again to Rey, entire body a tense coil of undetermined potential energy.

“You didn’t tell me that.”

“You didn’t give me the chance!” She’d barely said the words before she reeled her own temper in, chastised by her own fear. “And it’s not like _I_ know him.” A pause, and she grimaced; Hux had always found it interesting, to watch people so hamstrung by their own innate honesty. “Well. Not exactly. I fought him on Starkiller. Armitage…Armitage was in the First Order. Like Kylo Ren.”

“Was?” With derisive chuckle, he said, “I still _am._ ”

He almost regretted the words when Skywalker turned his gaze upon him again. For all Hux had wanted the man’s attention, it was a double-edged blade: few could bear the full focus of such an individual. Hux, who had so often courted that exact thing from Kylo Ren, had no intention of letting himself be cowed by what amounted to simply another Skywalker.

The faint curl of the man’s lips suggested he understood Hux far more than he might have liked him to. “So: a member of the First Order and a girl from Jakku, sent here by my sister to have me come back to civilisation and defeat the Empire once and for all.” The derision made the girl flinch, but Hux could taste something far less bitter beneath it. “Is that what this is about?”

Even in the deepening darkness, Hux could see Rey’s hand tightening about the hilt of the rescued saber. “We need your help.” Her earnestness might had touched his own heart, had Hux still believed he had one. But her hope didn’t lie with him, only with the man she now entreated with wide eyed. “There’s this…thing, inside of me. And I think it’s always been there. But I don’t know what to do about it. How to control it.” She swallowed hard. “I think only you can help me.”

All he gave her was pity. Still, there lurked regret enough to latch onto. “My help may be the last thing you need.”

“It’s not.” Skywalker’s head whipped around, and Hux couldn’t help a thin lipped smirk. “She told you where she was from, I’m assuming.”

“She did.” The wariness crackled about him, an odd preternatural energy that reminded him of Ren while simultaneously seeming a thousand light years away from the man. “And where are _you_ from?”

The question startled him enough to elicit a genuine answer. “Arkanis.”

One bushy eyebrow rose. “Similar neighbourhood.” At Hux’s silence, he added with an airy amusement, “I was raised on Tatooine.”

Much as he doubted that Luke Skywalker, of all people, was trying to build a rapport with him, Hux couldn’t help the snappy tone. “My family is actually from Coruscant.”

“Ah. An academy boy, then?”

The arch words burned, something like shame creeping up hot beneath his collar. It made no sense. This man, for all his ridiculous and overblown deeds, had been born a moisture farmer from Tatooine. But then, Hux had never been stranger to the feeling of never having been good enough – for his position, for his command. For the son of a princess, grandson of a queen, heir to the dark lord of all things.

Yet for all he’d only ever been the bastard whelp of a kitchen maid, here he stood now before Luke Skywalker, the last known Jedi and truest hope of the free galaxy.

“She doesn’t know anything about her past,” Hux said, blunt and swift in the conversational shift. “But I have a very good idea of who she really is.” He didn’t hide the sharpened edge of his smirk this time. “And I want your opinion on it.”

Both eyebrows rose high now. “I wasn’t aware First Order officers were much in the want of Luke Skywalker’s opinions.”

“I think you’ll understand why.”

A shift of his weight had Hux glancing to the man’s belt, though he saw no obvious weapon hung there. Glancing up again, he found Skywalker’s eyes very blue, and very knowing. “All right, then. Tell me.”

He couldn’t help but scowl. “I have a question for you, first.” At his sides, his hands curled to fists. Good sense screamed at him that this was not something he should be asking, and he shouldn’t give a damn about the answer. And yet—

“Did you try to kill him?” His nails dug deep into his palms, anger steeped and bitter upon his tongue. “Ben Solo, I mean.”

Skywalker started as if hit by sniped blastershot. Rey’s disbelief, on the other hand, burst out of her like the focused fire of a planetkiller. “What are you talking about?” Horror dawned across her features but a second later. Hux had always thought she’d be a quick study, even before he’d known the truth. “…Han said a student turned against him. Destroyed the school. Are you saying it was…”

“Ben did it, yes.” But for all there was clearly weary and long-held guilt to be found there, Skywalker’s words were sharp and demanding as he looked again to Hux. “Who told you about what happened?”

His own blood had turned hot and thick. For all he’d wanted to feel only dark satisfaction – the Force-blessed hero of the galaxy, proven to be as flawed and foolish as any other mere mortal – Hux couldn’t help but think of how he’d come about the knowledge. Of the dark, wet eyes. Of the blunt calloused fingers wrapped around his own, a child grasping for comfort.

“Kylo Ren.”

“Did you?” Rey’s demand came high, shrill. “Did you try to kill _your own nephew_?”

Caught between Hux’s silent fury, and Rey’s rising disbelief, Luke Skywalker seemed very small, and very tired. “It’s really not that simple, Rey.”

Nothing ever was, in Hux’s experience. But for all Rey had been raised by the unforgiving scrapyards of an even more unforgiving desert planet, she bore yet an innocence Hux didn’t believe he’d ever once known himself. Turning on them both, she ran, slim sleek form disappearing into the gloom like a slice fish into deep ocean.

Left behind, Skywalker sat down heavily, his sigh loud in the lingering silence.

“Armitage.” It took him a moment to turn to face him, for all he – a patricide in his own right – knew he shouldn’t care that Ren had not lied to him in this. It took him longer to take a seat across from the old man, his throat tight, fisted hands aching yet.

And Skywalker just sighed again, though his eyes remained sharp. “You won’t be able to convince me that a low-level officer in the First Order would just happen to know that story.” One hand rose – fleshless, dark metal – and pushed hair back from his forehead. “So why would he tell you about it?”

“I don’t think he meant to.” And he meant it honestly enough. “But he would get…maudlin. After sex.”

Even as Skywalker winced, looking away, it felt a hollow enough victory. “I assume Snoke is still his master.”

Curiosity got the better of him. “Have you ever met him?”

“Not outside a nightmare.” Skywalker’s eyes returned to his, though the weariness now held a taint of anger. “He’s still alive, then.”

“Can’t you tell?” He didn’t bother masking the sarcastic tilt. “Through the Force?”

His eyes, very blue, blinked just once. “I don’t feel anything through the Force. Not anymore.”

So, that theory had been the correct one – Luke Skywalker had indeed cut himself off from the Force. Hux had to be thankful for that, in that he would therefore have no idea of the destruction of the Hosnian System. Ren had told him, well over a year ago, of the disturbance the destruction of Alderaan had caused in the Force. They’d been speaking of the consequences of using Starkiller; Hux could only assume that that had been why Ren hadn’t been on-planet for her first and only firing. Given the state of their former relationship at the time, there had been no way to know for sure what Ren had felt when it had eventually happened.

If he’d felt anything at all.

“He should be destroyed.” Hux’s voice had turned brittle, hard. “Snoke, I mean.”

Skywalker remained very still. “I can’t help you.”

“But she can.”

That aching weariness returned, again. Hux wanted nothing so much as to slap it away. “And then what? You free Kylo Ren from his influence, and all is well?” His lips curled, the bitter knowledge of one much older, one much wiser to the contrary chaos of the galaxy at large. “It’s really not that simple. Armitage.”

He bristled at the use of his given name. “I didn’t say it was.” Then, like an experimental jab with a sharpened dagger: “You really have no idea who she is, do you.”

“Should I?”

Though he wasn’t quite gloating, he couldn’t help but find some joy in knowing what he did. At knowing what not a single one of them could. “I wonder if it was Snoke, or if it was Ren.” A shiver skipped through him: half of wonder, half of horror. “It’s just so much… _power_.”

“I’m too tired for games, Armitage.”

“She’s your niece.” The blue eyes widened, and he couldn’t let himself laugh. If he did, he might never stop. “She’s the daughter of Leia Organa and Han Solo.” But Hux could feel his face aching, knowing his smile stretched it far too wide. “She’s Kylo Ren’s sister.”

“No.”

“Oh, yes.” With rising glee, he all but vibrated in his seat. “I took a genetic sample from her – with permission, I might add.” Skywalker’s disbelief couldn’t take this victory from him. “I wasn’t expecting this level of…accuracy, shall we say. I was assuming that I’d just get a good idea of her basic genetic profile.” He could feel himself deflating, suddenly, though he didn’t quite understand why. “I didn’t expect a direct familial match.”

Skywalker’s own words came flat. “A match.”

“I have a genetic profile for Kylo Ren.” This time, he really did sneer. “I’ll let you imagine how I got the sample for it.”

“I’ll have my imagination let that one slide.” With his hands stilled in his lap, Skywalker’s features had turned pale, but set hard. “Do you have this evidence?”

The datapad had been his closest companion since leaving the _Finalizer_. Skywalker glanced at it for only the briefest second before handing it back. Ren used to speak of verifying things through the Force. That he would simply _know_ things to be true, simply because the Force said so. Hux had always thought it so much bullshit. Now he suspected he knew where Ren had got it from.

“Is that enough?”

“No. But it’s the only verification I’ll risk in the meantime.” Those eyes had turned very dark now, night continuing its descent around them both. “Give me a moment.”

Not that he waited for permission. Skywalker instead disappeared into a nearby hut; within moments he returned, setting aside a small basket as he set about lighting a fire in the cold pit before them. Once it burned low and hot, he placed an iron plate over its heat, setting upon it some sort of thick uncooked dough. It sizzled in a strangely coloured butter as it cooked, but the scent seemed inoffensive enough. Once it had cooked, Skywalker crumbled what seemed soft honeycomb over it, handed it to him without a word.

Though he still didn’t have much of an appetite – and his throat still ached – Hux appreciated the glucose hit. It allowed his mind to keep planning, to keep turning over new information, to keep searching for the advantage he would surely need to get out of this ridiculous situation not only in one piece, but entirely on top.

“I suppose you meant to ask me who did it.” For his own part, Skywalker barely picked at his own honey-infused damper. “Who hid her all this time.”

“I assumed at first it was Snoke. That Ren could never be powerful enough.” His own mouthful had turned sour; he swallowed it only with difficulty. “Surely if Snoke didn’t want her the way he wanted Ren, he’d have just killed her.”

With his gaze turned into the flame, Skywalker’s blue eyes held a strange yellow shine. “And you don’t think that Ben Solo might have done that.”

“Killed his sister?” He couldn’t help but scoff. “No.”

“No.” He repeated it once, then shook his head with a humourless chuckle. “And yet, he killed his father.”

The chill he felt then had nothing to do with the ambient temperature. “Did she tell you that?”

“No. Chewbacca did.”

In the silence that followed, his words had a dissonant sound. “You tried to kill your nephew.”

“That is what he saw.” With another sigh, his eyes slipped closed. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that is what happened.”

“He sounded fairly certain to me.”

“I’m sure he did.” Standing now, he turned away, didn’t look back. “Tell Rey to come see me in the morning. She has training to begin.”

The village should have been empty, after Skywalker returned to his hut with the makeshift door closed tight behind him. But Hux didn’t need to see a single one of the xeno inhabitants to know that they watched him, silent and judgemental from their windows. His skin crawled all the way back down to the ship, long after he knew he had logically moved beyond their gaze.

At the _Falcon_ , Hux saw no sign of the Wookiee. Rey sat alone, staff across her knees, staring at the distant sky. Even in the dark he could see the redness of her eyes. The gathering clouds had almost entirely blocked out the stars.

“He wants to see you. First thing tomorrow.” He sharpened his tone when she paid him no heed. “To begin your training.”

Her smile came faint, weary. “What if I’ve changed my mind?”

“Don’t you want to know who you are?”

And she snorted, shook her head. “As if you could tell me.”

He only watched as she shifted, rose, disappeared into the _Falcon_. It seemed only appropriate when the first drops of rain began to fall. Hux closed his eyes. He knew this feeling. He’d felt it often enough as a child on Arkanis, alone and afraid of the storm.

He didn’t go inside until he was soaked through to the bone.

*****

As the days passed, Hux kept out of the way of them all. Something brewed between Rey and Skywalker: delicate and strange and inevitable. Much as he didn’t care for mysticism of any kind, he knew better than to disturb its genesis. Though he should have learned much more from his ill-advised entanglement with Kylo Ren, that was apparently the one lesson that actually stuck.

The Wookiee still regarded him with obvious distrust, not that he had any real desire to seek out his company. Hux was quite content alone, using the datapad to work through various design issues that had fallen by the wayside during the run up to Starkiller’s firing. Though he didn’t attempt to comm out – that was not how he wished for this to go – he did yearn for his command ship. The rustic nature of this place grated at him. While he did at least have the freighter to use for bathing facilities, the legendary _Millennium Falcon_ was proving to be little more than a ramshackle ship with few luxuries. Much as he hated to go native, Hux found himself taking both soap and a ragged towel down to one of the calmer rock pools.

There he stripped naked beneath the gormless gaze of a thousand pairs of eyes upon him. While he could have done without the audience of porgs, it wasn’t as though he’d ever been permitted to entertain shyness of body; raised in the non-privacy of a military junta, it was also not the first cold bath he’d ever taken. Hot water still came as a luxury, even to a general in the First Order. Lying back, rock prickling against his spine, Hux stared at the clouded sky as his flesh prickled with gooseflesh. Relaxing, it was not. He closed his eyes anyway.

“Hux.”

Adrenaline flashed through his veins like lightning strike; he found his feet with toes curling into the ragged bottom, uncaring of the sharp rocks piercing into soles. Water slopped around his thighs, chill in the rising wind as it sluiced down his shoulders. Hux had attention only for Kylo Ren, standing but feet away upon the shore. Oddly he wore not his usual dramatic robes, but rather a more understated tunic. Hux was more shocked to see his face bisected by a wound, held closed with dark mesh. The skin around it flushed an angry red, but otherwise his flesh remained deathly pale, his eyes very dark.

Hux swallowed hard, acknowledged the bitter taste of something like fear. The monomolecular blade he habitually wore remained in its sheath, buried in the pile of his clothing he’d left behind when he’d entered the water. He’d been a fool not to keep it closer. Yet sense and clear thought returned as the water continued to shift around him, cold and ever restless. The blade would have been of little use. Kylo Ren could not be here.

“How are you doing this?”

Kylo only stared, unblinking. “Tell me where you are.”

“No.”

His face spasmed, the fury a clap of sudden thunder. “You’re with _her_.” He hissed it out like he might spit poison. “With Rey.”

He tilted his head, wet hair falling into his eyes. “Have you been talking to her?”

At that he actually took pause. Hux had always hated this particular expression on his face: sudden, gleeful malice. “Are you _jealous_ , Hux?”

The snort was only somewhat forced. “Get out of my head, Ren. You’re not welcome here.”

“But I was.” He took a step forward. “Once.”

Hux did not flinch. “Yes. Once.”

Some part of him managed to be hurt, that Ren reacted not at all to that. He hated himself for it. “What do you think you’re doing, General?”

“My job.” His own turn turned light, mocking. “Why, what are _you_ doing?”

The darkening gaze served as a warning. Hux had never been particularly inclined to listen to such. “Your place is here.”

“Oh, but I am coming back.” Arching an eyebrow, he added carelessly, “With her.”

“Does she know that?”

“Why don’t you ask her?”

“I already have.” He leaned forward, and despite the lightyears that separated him, he felt dreadfully close. Too close. As close as he had ever been, when they’d shared the same bed. The same air. The same pleasures.

“Do you want to know what she said?”

He shivered, but did not look away. “What do you want, Ren?”

An odd smile played at his lips, thoughtful and thin. “Maybe I’ll kill you. When you come back.” And his tone turned hard. Hux had heard him speak like this, more than once. Usually when some unfortunate battalion had not done exactly as he had asked. If he’d even asked at all. “You abandoned your post.”

“Starkiller was lost.” It should not have been easy to meet that dark, accusing gaze. And yet, it was the simplest thing in the world. “And it was lost because of _you_.”

“How do you even know Snoke will take you back?”

“Because he wanted the girl.” He laughed. He couldn’t help it. “And unlike you, I can deliver her.”

With a shake of his head, Ren scowled. His dark hair, usually so full and shimmering, lay lank and lifeless over his shoulders. “You have no idea what game you are playing here, General.”

“On the contrary.” The smile bared all of his teeth. “I suspect I have a better hand than you could ever imagine.”

For a moment, all Hux knew was his gaze: those dark deep eyes, large enough to swallow the galaxy whole. Then he turned away. Somewhere in the motion, he vanished. Alone, shivering, Hux had never hated him more.

“Armitage?” A voice came from further up the shore. Closer. More solid. More _real_. “Armitage!”

His voice could have been that of a poorly programmed droid. “I’m down here.”

Rey came into sight a moment later, careening across the uneven ground. Skidding to a stop before the rockpool, it felt a minor miracle that she didn’t launch headfirst into it. “I felt him! And I thought…I thought…” The words stuttered, ceased; her mouth hung open. With a sigh, Hux closed his eyes, opened them again.

“Do you mind if I get dressed before we have this conversation?”

The flush rose right to her hairline. “I…”

And he actually took pity on her, for all it was not an emotion he came by naturally. “I’ll meet you by the _Falcon_. We can talk there.”

Despite the chill of both the unnatural visit and the rising wind, after Rey scampered away Hux took his time about dressing. Back at the ship he found no sign of Chewbacca, nor of Skywalker. Though Hux had never seen the Jedi venture this far down, presumably he had been; he hadn’t seen the Wookiee go near the village at all.

Rey had built a fire, and there she sat alone, face strange in the dancing light. Hux took a place beside her, told himself he didn’t care when she didn’t look over.

“You’re in…some sort of relationship. With him.”

A snort, and his hands dug deep into his thighs. “I’m not sure that’s exactly what I’d call it.” Before she could be stupid enough to guess more at what she couldn’t possibly understand, he added with scathing purpose, “And whatever it was, it’s in the past.”

“No.” She seemed very certain, staring into the flames as if she might use them to divine some nebulous future. “It really isn’t.”

Much as he ached to argue the point, logic agreed with her. And much as he hated to ascribe logic to something as ridiculous as the Force itself, he could not deny that the conversation he and Ren had just shared should not have been possible.

“I’ve been talking to him. The…the interrogation. It did something to us. …bound us together, somehow. We can speak to each other. Through the Force.”

He took a second to bite back that odd feeling he would not call jealousy, no matter what that fool Ren chose to believe. “He said something to that effect.”

“But he did it with you, too. Just now.” With head tilted she looked to him now, curiosity bright upon even her shadowed features. “You don’t have the Force, do you.”

They both knew it to be more statement than question. With a practised shrug, he agreed. “No, I don’t.” Still, he couldn’t help needle a bit deeper. “But from what I understood, the amount of fucking we got up to did something to the both of us.” Yet his smirk vanished, then. “Snoke certainly didn’t like it.”

The sharp look slid between his ribs like a well-placed dagger. “Is that why…you’re not together?”

“It would have happened no matter what.” His voice turned cold, forbidding. “It’s long over, between us.”

She didn’t argue the point. He told himself that that was what he’d wanted as she turned to stare into the fire again. Her profile, so lovely limned in gold, looked as though it belonged on coin, on statues, on portraits that lined the endless halls of royal palaces. It seemed impossible that Ren had never known it, for all he’d known the girl for hardly any time at all.

The question had to be asked, though like many others on this island, the answer was already long known. “Did Skywalker tell you what I told him?”

Her eyes closed, the tempest contained entirely within. Still he could taste ozone on the air, bright and burning. Ren had told him more than once that he was the most Force-null creature he’d ever had the misfortune to encounter. Yet he’d never been able to explain why Hux knew when the Force moved strongest within him.

“Yes. He told me.”

“And did you tell Ren?”

“No.” A convulsive shudder rocked her small body entire, her voice coming quick and breathless. “It must have been Snoke. He must have done this. You know that, don’t you? It was _him_.”

With throat dry as desert bone, he chuckled, shook his head. “I fear you’re much mistaken, if you believe Kylo Ren incapable of wiping your memory from everyone who ever knew you both, and leaving you to rot in an Imperial graveyard.”

She turned on him then, fierce, eyes ablaze. “He can’t have done it. He just _couldn’t_ have.” Now she leapt to her feet, burning gaze upon the _Falcon_. “We need to go back to him. Both of us.”

She’d startled him too much to hide it. “ _What_?”

“It makes sense, now. All of it.” The fervour she turned upon him now reminded him uncomfortably of Starkiller. Of the deep power that had flowed through him as he’d ranted before the ‘troopers, before the entire army. Of the certainty he’d known in that moment – that what he did had been a foregone conclusion. That what he had done was _right_.

“This was just the last piece, don’t you see that? We know, now. And so we can fix it. We can fix everything – you. Me. _Him_.”

He did not like the path she now dragged him along. “I don’t follow.”

“I think you do.” One hand gesticulated widely, its arc seeming to take in the galaxy in its entirety. “It’s Snoke. All of this was _Snoke_.”

“Rey—”

“He’s been in Ben’s mind since he was a child! He was so powerful, he even made _Luke Skywalker_ believe that Ben was purely dark. That he had no chance of being anything else.” Her smile had grown too bright, too wide. “And that’s just not true!”

“I don’t think you know what darkness is.”

“I do. I’ve seen it.” Insistent, now, she came too close. “Right here. On this island.”

He took a long step backward. “Rey.”

She rolled her eyes, did not follow. “I’m going, whether you come with me or not.”

“And what if I don’t?”

“Then you don’t.” From her tone, she didn’t believe it possible he could deny her. “But he’s my _brother_. I have to try.”

Frustration welled up in him, bright and furious. “Try to _what_?”

“To save him.” And she laughed. The fool child, she actually _laughed_. “Everyone gets second chances, Armitage. You can have one too.”

“I doubt that.”

“I don’t.” She turned again to the _Falcon_ , rested a hand upon one landing strut. “In the morning. I’m going.” She turned back, one eyebrow raised. “Either way, you’re not staying here, are you, Armitage?”

When he clenched his fist, he could feel the pull of the sheath of his monomolecular blade, strapped tight to his wrist. “As if anyone in their right mind would ever _want_ to stay on this cursed planet,” he said, in perfect bitter truth.

*****

After the first day, Hux had not seen Skywalker anywhere but from a distance. On the last morning, Hux took a final bath in the cool, salted waters. It was there that Skywalker came to him, down by the rockpool as he stared into his own reflection, rippled and warped by alien waters.

“She thinks she can change your mind.”

Hux didn’t turn to look at him. “And you don’t think she can.”

“I think you were raised to believe things that are very hard to unlearn.”

In the pool, his shifting image held nothing of the perfectly coiffed general. His red hair had turned wild without pomade, his beard all too quick to grow thick and strong. “The legends say you forgave your father for everything that he ever did.” He shook his head; he looked so peculiar, dressed like a rebel instead of a soldier. “Did you really believe that was enough to undo every evil Vader ever visited upon the galaxy?”

“Legends rarely get the details right.”

He left it as silence for a long moment, shadows lengthening in the setting suns. “And you’re not going to stop us.” He shook his head, corrected. “Her.”

“It is as the Force wills it.”

“Do you really believe that?”

Though he chuckled, it sounded very far from amused. “At this point, what I believe is irrelevant.” And when Hux did at last look to him, he appeared nothing so much as exhausted beyond caring. “The torch has been passed, Armitage. It’s out of my hands now.”

His brow creased. “What torch?”

“They didn’t teach you metaphors in that fancy academy of yours?”

“I never went to the Academy.” He didn’t bother to bite back his anger, let it flow from him as though from a slashed artery. “I starved and scraped for my meagre place out in the Unknown Regions.” And he laughed himself there, a harsh cawing sound. “Not exactly the luxurious lot of an Imperial brat, is it?”

Those knowing eyes saw right through him, and they both knew it. But she’d said he had no link to the Force, had purposefully shut himself off from it. Ren had guessed the same, had told him so years ago.

He supposed both of them could both be wrong, and completely right.

“She came here to touch the Force. It touched her in return.” Skywalker sounded almost gentle, as if he explained the concept of death to a small child. “It’s time for her to go.”

“And what if she dies?”

He blinked. “What do you care?”

That should not have hurt. “You can’t possibly trust me.”

“It’s not you that I need to trust.” Dusting off his robes, now, he actually shrugged. Hux wanted to hate him. “But in the end, it’s your choice. Go, or don’t go. It will happen with or without your presence.”

“And you? You’re just…going to stay here?” The depth of his sudden anger staggered him. It would be so much easier to have him out of their way, and yet. “Hardly the actions of a hero.” As he sneered he knew he ought to stop, but still did not. “It seems more the coward’s way out, to me.”

“I came here for answers. The same as you did.” Skywalker had folded his hands – both organic, and not – into his long sleeves. “I got mine. Did you?”

He shivered, deeper than ever before. “I am no Jedi.”

“There are no Jedi left, here.” And he actually smiled. “Are you going to make your choice or not, Armitage?”

In the end he found that Rey waited for him by the _Falcon_ , slim and sure. He hated her, even before she opened her damn fool mouth.

“You’re going to help me, aren’t you.” The smile she wore trembled upon her lips, eyes bright and set strong. “I knew you would.”

He supposed he ought to have known long ago that he’d inevitably loathe all Skywalkers. “But you don’t know everything.”

“I know enough.”

He chose to ignore that. Or at least, he told himself as much as he strapped himself into a seat. He’d been fool enough to think like her, once upon a time.

But he’d long since learned never to believe in happy endings.


End file.
